A California court has ruled that state gambling regulators lacked authority to impose new rules that would have placed tighter restrictions on cardrooms, player-dealer positions and blackjack-style games.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Darwin struck down regulations announced in February by the California Bureau of Gambling Control, finding that the bureau did not have authority to issue statewide rules of that kind.
“The bureau did not have the authority to issue statewide regulations,” Darwin said, according to Courthouse News.
The rules would have required player-dealer positions at cardroom tables to rotate every 40 minutes or for the game to end. Tables would also have been required to clear all wagers and cards.
The regulations would also have restricted blackjack-style games by removing the ability for players to win automatically with a hand totalling 21. Instead, winning hands would have been determined by comparison with the player-dealer’s hand.
California cardrooms have long operated under a model that differs from tribal casinos and Las Vegas-style house-banked gaming. State law prohibits cardrooms from offering games in which the house banks the game. To operate table games, cardrooms use licensed third-party proposition player services, which provide players to occupy the player-dealer position.
The California Gaming Association filed a lawsuit in March, arguing that the Bureau of Gambling Control had overreached and that the proposed rules would cause serious harm to the state’s cardroom sector. The association argued that the bureau’s role was to enforce gambling law, not rewrite it.
The regulations had been scheduled to take effect on April 1, but were blocked by a preliminary injunction while the case proceeded.
Judge Darwin’s ruling sided with the cardroom industry and rejected the state’s attempt to impose the new framework through regulatory action.
Kyle Kirkland, president of the California Gaming Association, said the case went beyond gaming policy.
“For more than a year, we have said this case is about far more than gaming — it is about whether the Attorney General and his regulators can bypass the Legislature and unilaterally rewrite decades of established law,” Kirkland said.
The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta said it was disappointed by the ruling and was reviewing its options. It has not confirmed whether it will appeal.
The decision is a significant win for California’s cardroom industry, which has faced sustained pressure from tribal gaming interests and state regulators over the structure of player-dealer games. It also leaves any major change to the cardroom model more likely to require legislative action rather than regulatory interpretation.
